Searchable ink notes?

[iPaddict 6]

Dear Evernote,

Are there plans to make Ink Notes searchable in a future release? OneNote does this very easily, but I'm trying to stay with Evernote. My new Surface Book really has me looking at OneNote because of this functionality. Taking Ink Notes is useless if you can't later search them.

Thanks

 

[DTLow 5,736]

10 minutes ago, iPaddict said:

Are there plans to make Ink Notes searchable in a future release?

Ink entries from my iPad are searchable.  Not sure if that corresponds to Widows ink notes

[gazumped 11,661]

31 minutes ago, iPaddict said:

Are there plans to make Ink Notes searchable in a future release?

Evernote famously don't (usually) discuss future plans or release schedules.  From a quick test it appears that ink notes are not searchable in themselves.  They're not saved as pictures (I don't think),  so the image is not OCR'd - although in a recent blog post Evernote did suggest that where electronics are banned,  a viable alternative is to take ink notes on paper and take a picture of the paper afterward.  There are also a variety of ways to take electronic notes with a stylus and third-party software and save the results to Evernote.

[iPaddict 6]

17 hours ago, gazumped said:

Evernote famously don't (usually) discuss future plans or release schedules.  From a quick test it appears that ink notes are not searchable in themselves.  They're not saved as pictures (I don't think),  so the image is not OCR'd - although in a recent blog post Evernote did suggest that where electronics are banned,  a viable alternative is to take ink notes on paper and take a picture of the paper afterward.  There are also a variety of ways to take electronic notes with a stylus and third-party software and save the results to Evernote.

Thanks for the reply. You are correct that the Ink Notes on Windows are not OCR'd, and they do not seem to be an image file at all, because you can bring up an old ink note and accidentally scribble all over it if you touch it with your finger or mouse. I really wish you could make the things "static" after finishing up, and have it become a PNG file or something.

There are actually very few decent ink-note taking apps for Windows 10, and even fewer than can communicate with EN. The best, by far of the maybe 3 that exist, is called Nebo. It does OCR on the fly as you write. It does not communicate at all with EN, but of course exports directly to OneNote. To get a note into EN, you have to save it as a Word document, then to have it be searchable in EN, you have to save as a PDF into the import directory for EN. Not really very feasible long term solution.

Notebook Pro is really the only other decent ink-note program that exists, and it also will not share to Evernote. You can export a page as a PNG, and save it to the EN import folder.

It would just be nice if EN itself had an ink-note capability that was OCR'd and searchable because the workarounds for Windows suck.